2001-02-07 - 5:41pm

Who's Who Cheat Sheet
Who I Read

On the internal soundtrack: "Come Together", Beatles

Telemarketers occasionally call the house, asking for me by name. The vast majority of them seem to have gotten my number through the Visa card I have, which means I should probably get a new one, but it doesn't annoy me quite enough yet.

Anyway, Poindexter usually tells people, "She can't hear", which they seem to often take as "She's not here". (Who is it that has trouble hearing, again?)

Last night, the following exchange took place:

Telemarketer: Hello, may I speak to Evelynne Poindexter?
Poindexter: She's deaf, she can't hear, therefore she cannot talk on the phone.
Telemarketer: Oh, I'm sorry.
Poindexter: [Brightly] No, it's quite all right, she's been living with it for a long time and she handles it well.
Telemarketer: Um, okay, bye-bye.

When he relayed the conversation to me, the "living with it/handles it well" comment made me laugh hysterically. "Handles it well" is a gross understatement. I make the adjustments I need to make and get on with life.

I can't figure out why they say "I'm sorry", unless it's an automatic reaction to feeling awkward. Unless, of course, they think being hard-of-hearing is a horrible affliction. (Technically I think I'm probably deaf, but hearing aids and a love of language help a lot.) I don't think it is, but since I depend on my sight so much I'm pretty horrified by the idea of going blind, so there's that.

Y'know, I've always been mystified by the idea of choosing your primary "identity" based on something like race, sexual orientation, or deafness. I'm not talking about being unashamed of those qualities -- I should HOPE you'd be unashamed -- but to use them as the primary means by which you DEFINE yourself? I don't get it.

There's no way in hell I could choose one thing as my "identity" and it certainly wouldn't be a random genetic accident. My being hard-of-hearing (HOH) is an incidental. It has had a part in shaping who I am, but then, so has being female, white, and middle-class American, and I don't see any of those things as being my primary identity.

My primary identity is just ME. I'm Evelynne. I define myself by the things that I think, feel, and do. To choose one of them over all the others wouldn't tell you a damn thing about me. And which do you think tells you more about who I am: the fact that I'm HOH, or how I deal with being HOH?

Well, so, some crazy person was caught with a gun near the White House today.

Doesn't he KNOW it's ILLEGAL to own or carry a gun in D.C.?!

Secret service agents wounded him before he could do any damage, is what I'm hearing. That's good to know.

Speaking of guns, I think I'm going to ask my in-laws, who own several, to take me to a range while I'm visiting them. I want to try it out and see how I feel about it. Frankly, I'm scared of guns. I mean, people use guns to kill people. I'd be pretty happy if guns didn't exist.

But the fact is, they do. They're not going away. And when I hear those stories about school shootings, church shootings, restaurant shootings, Capitol shootings in places where carrying a gun on your person is illegal, I get fucking pissed. If I was carrying a gun, I wouldn't hesitate to shoot a person who tried to do something like that, if it would save other people's lives (not to mention my own).

This was the thing that turned me pro-gun-rights. The idea that these kind of crimes could be prevented or curtailed by rational gun owners. That criminals might think twice about opening fire knowing other people had guns too. I hate the thought of all those unarmed people in a church being at the mercy of one asshole criminal with a gun. If guns were illegal everywhere, criminals would still have them -- every gun-related crime in DC is committed with an illegal gun, for example -- and law-abiding people would have no choice but to be sacrificed in those cases.

I've heard the argument that if guns were illegal everywhere in the States, there would be none available for criminals to use. It's a lovely idea, but if you believe it's possible, gimme a little while and I'll tell you where you can score some good crack.

I'm awfully focused on social/political issues lately. I'm getting a little tired of it. It's tiring. I'll try to find a new hobby.

Also, we had another interesting phone call last night, but I'll write about that tomorrow.

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